...In the lovely closing moment of Sue de Beer's most recent video, The Dark Hearts, 2003, a girl in the driver's seat picks up a gloomy boy from his house
for a runaway spin to a blue-screen make-out glen. The goth kiddo Adonis takes off his studded and dangling-chain leather collar and puts it around the girl's neck;
she takes off her double-stranded necklace of fake, pearly beads and embraces his neck with it. They daintily peck each other. A skull decal looks out at the boy from
the passenger-side dashboard. The horror? The horror is the world they live in, which necessitates, instead of diary keeping, making "morgue entries" to figure out their
lives. This is the world that's been left to them: darkness transacting in between boy parts and girl parts, in between loving and leaving, in between teen lonliness and
adult existence.

De Beer's teens resonate with those night shades created by the twentieth-level wizard and theoretician of the in-between as a state of being, Joss Whedon,
the brillian maestro of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He found in Buffy and the Scooby gang the fittest embodiments for the tumult of nascent adulthood and
(as the show and its characters grew) for the brutality of living in the world, where people die, or stop loving, or disappear or change in ways never thought
possible, where the Scoobys came to understand, as they shape shifted into their adult selves, that the true horror isn't anything outside but the fractal gruesomeness
of dealing with personal demons, psychic slaying often done alone...